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Book Review - Genocide's Aftermath: Responsibility And Repair

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  • Book Review - Genocide's Aftermath: Responsibility And Repair

    BOOK REVIEW - GENOCIDE'S AFTERMATH: RESPONSIBILITY AND REPAIR
    by Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian (Editors)

    Metapsychology, NY
    Dec 19 2007

    Wiley-Blackwell, 2007
    Review by Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., C.C.C. Reg., S.A.C. (Dip.)
    Dec 18th 2007 (Volume 11, Issue 51)

    When genocide scholars meet in international forums, one cannot help
    but notice that historians, political scientists, sociologists,
    and psychologists enjoy strong representation in the scholarly
    crowd, but equally obvious is the penury of philosophers drawn
    to this subject of inquiry. Thus it is refreshing to find that,
    with Blackwell's publication this year of Genocide's Aftermath,
    philosophers are finally joining the chorus of investigators addressing
    this critical topic. Analysis of genocide, perhaps the most horrific
    of phenomena to scar the landscape of human history, is necessarily
    a multi-disciplinary task, as its origins are to be found in a broad
    array of dangerous factors that inhabit every arena of human life.

    The shortage of philosophical attention to genocide, therefore,
    has been a genuine problem to a full understanding of genocide.

    Philosophers bring something unique to the table of scholarly
    discussion, as their expertise prepares them well to clarify and
    articulate a conceptual understanding of the nature of the peculiar
    crime against humanity labeled "genocide." The collection of essays by
    philosophers in Genocide's Aftermath makes a valuable and much-needed
    contribution to the scholarly study of genocide.

    The volume opens with an essay by Claudia Card, "Genocide and Social
    Death," in which she recounts her definition of the peculiar harm
    effected by genocide, first explored in her 2002 book, The Atrocity
    Paradigm (Oxford University Press). Card's notion of social death as
    the distinctive harm of genocide focuses attention away from victims
    as individuals and toward individual victims as members of ethnic
    groups left degraded as cultural entities. For Card, genocide is
    "evil" for the obvious reason: it composes a unilateral slaughter of
    defenseless civilians, including babies, mothers and old folks. But,
    before their death and after the genocide, social death is achieved
    by particularly dehumanizing treatment of the victims. Victims
    are deprived of control over vital trans-generational interests and
    other vital aspects of human life. They are dehumanized and degraded,
    including being stripped, robbed, deceived, sexually violated, made to
    witness the murder of their family members, and made to participate in
    their own murder; they are killed without regard for their lingering
    suffering or exposure, and once murdered, their corpses are treated
    with disrespect.

    For Card, genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, the killing
    of great numbers of individuals. Nor is it simply the scandalous and
    degrading nature of genocide's harms to individual victims that draws
    forth the peculiar opprobrium that Card names "evil." The crux of
    genocide's peculiar evil resides in the fact that social vitality is
    erased in the victim group so that harm extends beyond corpse counts
    to the murder of cultural heritage, the erosion of intergenerational
    connections, and the "natal alienation" of descendents of the victim
    group. These grave losses on the group level Card names "social
    death." Social death aggravates physical death by making it indecent
    (p. 81) and kills the community, as a setting for group life and for
    observance of a shared cultural tradition. Future generations of the
    victim group suffer erasure as members of a cultural heritage.

    Mohammed Abed's "Clarifying the Concept of Genocide" reviews
    the definition of genocide established by the 1948 United Nations
    Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
    deeming it arbitrary and inadequate and clarifying its conceptual
    shortcomings. Then Abed explores the harms inflicted by genocide to
    determine whether these harms are qualitatively different from the
    harms imposed by other forms of political violence. He concludes
    that one of the greatest harms effected upon ethnic entities
    is one that has been consistently underappreciated in scholarly
    discourse and that remains unaddressed in post-genocidal reparation
    responses. Abed argues that many ethnic groups self-identify in
    terms of sacred spaces. Cultures tend to be "territorially bounded,"
    remarks Abed, so one of the worst harms done during genocide is
    their group's removal from their historic dwelling places. Values,
    norms of behavior, mythic components of cultural life, and other
    symbolic mechanisms that condition and shape cultural memory are
    invested in ancestral territories, so deportations often cause the
    "destruction of the national pattern" of the group" and have a serious
    impact upon the psychological profile of survivors and descendents
    within the group (p. 37). Social death" is most successful where
    peoples have been driven off their ancestral lands and robbed of
    their territories; Abed cites the reservation system which confines
    American Indians, the township and homeland systems of South Africa,
    and the collectivization of peasant farming by Stalin as examples of
    this aspect of social death.

    Karen Kovach shifts the focus from victim groups to perpetrator groups
    in her "Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups."

    Against the traditional accounting of culpability as resting upon
    moral individualism, Kovach refuses that individuals alone should
    be deemed moral agents, and she warns of the danger of failing to
    recognize the inherited nature of moral status across generations
    within ethnic groups. She insists that the completion of the mourning
    process for victim groups parallels the degree to which predecessors
    in the ethnic community of the perpetrators accept responsibility
    for the acts of their ancestors. To identify oneself as a member of
    an ethnic community, argues Kovach, is to act in the context of a
    history that already contains morally significant actions and events.

    In a troubling universalizing move reminiscent of the ancient world's
    "pollution" tradition, Kovach insists that ethnic identity carries
    with it a moral burden, which necessarily imposes responsibility on
    descendents of perpetrators, causing them to share in a collective
    guilt for the crimes of their forefathers.

    Martina Oshana accepts and extends Kovach's notion of inherited
    guilt in her "Moral Taint," insisting that a person's moral record is
    "sullied by the unjust conduct of those with whom one is associated"
    (p. 71). As with tainted food and tainted relationships, taint
    occurs, according to Oshana, by "active participation or collusion
    on one's part or vicariously, by solidarity and collective liability
    arrangements" (p. 83). Most troubling is her insistence that ties of
    responsibility hold descendents fast, "even where these connections
    are not deliberately forged" (p. 83). Oshana casts a very broad net
    in her quest for guilty descendents who must resign themselves to
    responsibility for past crimes, even where relations are "remote and
    perhaps even unrecognized," and indeed may be "involuntary" (p. 83).

    In a very disturbing conclusion, Oshana recommends the unhealthy
    sentiments of "shame, embarrassment, and injured pride" as appropriate
    starting points for "atonement" of moral errors in which the
    descendent-individuals had no part.

    Bill Wringe's "Collective Action and the Peculiar Evil of Genocide"
    represents a refreshing return to moral reality, as he wrestles with
    the problematic term "evil" introduced by Card. He settles upon a very
    helpful explanation of this mythico-religiously baggage-laden term,
    as an "intuition" that is characterized by a peculiar reaction.

    In opposition to Card's opening paper in this series, Wringe asserts
    that the intuition of genocide as an "evil" is not satisfied by
    the mere notion of social death (p. 101). While social death is no
    doubt devastating for ethnic communities, not even the Holocaust can
    rightly be said to have truly suffered a "death" of their cultural
    heritage. Without a paradigm example of social death, Wringe doubts
    that this phrase captures the harm experienced in the intuition of
    "evil" that we feel in relation to all genocides. Wringe then fleshes
    out the harm distinctively captured by the intuition: "disregard
    of and disrespect for [the victims'] embodied rationality and hence
    their humanity" (p. 106). Social death speaks to the harm to cultural
    identity, but the intuition of genocide's "evil" speaks to its attack
    on humanity. Genocide is a crime of a higher order.

    Stephen Winter's "On the Possibility of Group Injury" makes a stronger
    case for victim collective identity than the essays addressing
    perpetrator identity. "Group injury grounded in ethical individualism
    need not be simply reducible to individual interests," argues Winter,
    but because groups are damaged as groups by radical violence, their
    descendents often share in the harms suffered directly by their
    ancestors. Rodney Roberts continues the meditation upon victim groups
    and their right to rectificatory compensation for historical sufferings
    in "The Counterfactual Conception of Compensation," showing that our
    ideas about reparation to victim groups are hopelessly utopian. Since
    it is impossible to determine what would have happened if a certain
    historical injustice had not occurred, it is equally absurd to claim
    that injustices can be set to right. Indeed, argues Roberts, the
    compensation may just as well constitute a further injustice (p. 135).

    Roberts offers as example a tale of a reckless taxi driver who breaks
    my leg by crashing his car, thereby causing me to miss my airline
    flight, which crashes and kills all passengers. Calculations of
    what would have happened had the taxi driver been a more careful
    driver would conclude with my owing him, rather than his owing me
    for his negligence. Roberts claims that this example is as absurd as
    the descendants of African slaves claiming compensation for personal
    injury from the historical injustice of slavery, since, argues Roberts,
    these descendents owe their very existence to the institution of
    slavery. On the other hand, Roberts concedes that they would have a
    good claim to compensations for continuing patterns of social abuse
    perpetrated by the institution of slavery and for deeply embedded
    personal attitudes and policy assumptions endorsed by morality and
    law at the time of slavery in so far as this history continues to
    have detrimental effects upon their lives (p. 140).

    Haig Khatchadourian distinguishes reparative justice from a broader
    notion of compensatory justice in "Compensation and Reparation as
    Forms of Compensatory Justice." Where reparative justice requires
    that a party guilty of some historical harm is acknowledged as
    directly owing of compensation to a victim group, compensatory
    justice may offer an alternative that can more readily heal
    post-genocidal communities. Compensatory justice does not require
    such a wrong, an identifiable injurer, or an acknowledgement of
    culpability. In compensatory justice, society is seen to compensate
    victims without attending to perpetrator identity, much as in the
    case of natural disasters or accidents where perpetrators do not
    enter the discussion of what is owed to victims. This notion of
    compensation offers a healthy outlet for perpetrator descendents
    who may wish to see victims satisfied so they can move forward from
    their ancestors' wrongs (say, in the case of the Armenian Genocide)
    but feel forced to deny the historical crime because they are loathe
    to accept the label of genocideurs. Denial strives to wipe out the
    indignity from the record of history, but victims experience denial
    as a continuing affront to their dignity and the dignity of their
    ancestor-victims. Khatchadourian's notion of compensation offers them
    an alternative.

    Ernesto Verdeja explores the implications of reparations for
    post-atrocity transitions toward democracy in "A Normative Theory of
    Reparations in Transitional Democracies." Focusing upon Latin American
    nations, Verdeja recommends an official apology and reparations to
    victims of atrocities as crucial to the healing the factionalism
    of war-torn populations, and to achieving the goal of establishing
    equitable liberal institutions. Reparations allow a sense of a
    communal "we" to arise from a fragmented population, and an apology
    can strengthen public trust in the emergent government.

    Larry May's "Prosecuting Military Leaders for War Crimes" examines
    the legal foundations by which military and political leaders can
    be held to account for violations of international humanitarian
    law. May insists that, where minor figures are too often sacrificed
    as scapegoats to satisfy calls for justice from the international
    community, it is crucial that leaders rather than foot-soldiers be
    primary targets of war crimes prosecution. Only leaders satisfy
    the mens rea component of criminal culpability that should be a
    key indicator of guilt in war crimes and crimes against humanity,
    argues May, so leaders must be held responsible for the crimes of
    their subordinates and deprived of the defense of ignorance to their
    actions of their troops.

    Nir Eiskovits argues for the moral importance of truth commissions in
    post-atrocity reconciliations in his ""Rethinking the Legitimacy of
    Truth Commissions." Reasoning from Adam Smith's notion of sympathy,
    Eiskovits asserts that political and social reconciliation requires an
    "active sympathy," that is only achieved by a detailed exposure of
    the perpetrator community to the particular circumstances of their
    victims' suffering.

    William Bradford closes the volume with his "Acknowledging and
    Rectifying the Genocide of the American Indians." A responsible
    treatment of what is owed to victims of historical violences would
    remain incomplete without addressing the peculiar harms effected by
    300 years of dehumanizing treatment of the aboriginals of U.S.

    territories. Bradford argues for recognition of the harms done
    as harms of genocide, and for justice as "indigenism"--that is,
    a profound rethinking of the premises underlying current relations
    with the indigenous. Indians and non-Indians are now forced by
    history to occupy a common geographical home; their interdependence,
    argues Bradford, requires reconciliation that can only be achieved by
    acknowledging the original crimes and by accepting American Indians
    as a sovereign and independent nation, worthy of self-determination.

    Bradford counsels seven concrete steps to reconciliation
    (acknowledgement, apology, peacemaking, commemoration, symbolic
    compensation, land restoration, and reconciliation).

    This volume is a welcome addition to the wealth of scholarship
    on the topic of genocide, important for the heretofore penury of
    philosophical attention to this phenomenon. The reflections treat
    from many diverse angles the philosophical aspects of genocide: who
    counts as a victim? a perpetrator? Is responsibility inherited? How
    broad should responsibility for past atrocities extend? How can victim
    and perpetrator communities move forward in the interests of future
    peace and for the sake of justice? This volume will be found valuable
    reading, if troubling and controversial in parts, by any educated
    adult and would also be useful as a provocative text in university
    studies of genocide.

    © 2007 Wendy C. Hamblet

    Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., C.C.C. Reg., S.A.C. (Dip.), Assistant
    Professor, Division of University Studies, North Carolina A&T State
    University

    http://metapsychology.mentalhelp .net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3978&cn =135

    --Boundary_(ID_NkMHj40VuaLDd2VsbC3Jhg)--
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